I really don’t wanna go out and play football with the neighbors, and I really don’t wanna go to track practice, and I certainly don’t want to study math, but I really want to be on that stage with Neil Young. I listen to a Neil Young record with Crazy Horse and I’m thinking, “These guys are having a really, really good time.” That sounds like something I wanna do. A lot of people seem to focus on that, like, “Oh, this is so historic and it’s preserving history.” The songs that I put on there, they’re just because I love all this old music and I want to do it all. I don’t know that any of this is important. I didn’t really think of it as important it’s just the stuff that I love. Why was it important for you to draw on so many different styles? Your catalogue seems like a tip of the hat to the array of music Harry Smith once collected for the Anthology of American Folk Music. Sometimes this modern world can wear me down a little bit, but for the most part, it’s all good. If it were a different time, then I wouldn’t have all these other influences that inform what I do and the way that I do it. I think there’s a time and place for all this kind of music. This isn’t about a musician chasing the past or attempting to preserve it the latest batch of songs on his new album are his attempt to get closer to a style of music he loves and hopes others might happen to enjoy.ĭo you ever get the feeling you should’ve been born in a different time period? But for those who consider what he does in purist terms, Watson eschews such notions. 2 with David Rawlings on analog tape, nodding to a sepia-colored sound. For him, they’re players who created such magic through their respective voices and instruments that he jealously sought ways to participate in that feeling many decades later. 2, which culls an array of folk songs - for example “Gallows Pole,” “The Cuckoo Bird,” and “John Henry.” To gain his footing, Watson looked to Lead Belly, Reverend Gary Davis, and more as models. The former Old Crow Medicine Show member is touring behind his sophomore solo album, Folksinger Vol. He’s not attempting to recreate so much as create, and he just so happens to be using the past for inspiration. Comments about authenticity have long dogged him, but Watson prefers to avoid such talk. Beginning to play the banjo, Watson overlays his preferred clawhammer style with warbling vibrato, all of which add to the picture - as if he’d been among the musicians who traipsed to Bristol, Tennessee, to participate in Ralph Peer’s recording sessions in 1927. His wide-brimmed hat, plain button-down shirt, and twangy banter all pin him to a different era. When Willie Watson steps out alone on stage in Allston, Massachusetts, he looks every bit as though he’s wandered out of another time. Willie Watson – Acoustic Guitar, Banjo, Harmonica, Vocalsįor our friends who live in countries where YouTube is blocked, watch the session on Vimeo. Recorded off the cuff in essentially single takes, Watson’s organic sound pours out from within the songs of yesteryear. Many coming from the first 20’s recordings made up of folk icons like Leadbelly, Richard “Rabbit” Brown, and Woody Guthrie. 1”, is a compilation of folk standards reaching way back in recording history. With his acoustic guitar and claw-hammer style banjo, Watson reinvents old tunes in a way applicable to today’s listeners. Focusing on revitalizing a sound, Watson pays homage to folk singers of the past. Former singer and main man in Old Crow Medicine Show, he has moved on to pursue a solo career. Willie Watson is a folk and bluegrass musician whose high, reedy wail is the mainstay of his authentic sound.
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